Bourses clash on ticker symbols

The Securities and Exchange Commission will settle a dispute between the two largest U.S. stock exchanges over a plan to allocate stock symbols for the more than 7,000 publicly traded companies.

Regulators will decide on competing plans by Nasdaq Stock Market Inc. and the New York Stock Exchange over how many characters an exchange can use for company trading symbols, the SEC said in a statement Thursday.

Nasdaq wants to offer shorter tickers -- enabling companies that switch exchanges the chance to reserve their stock-trading symbols. Rival NYSE wants to maintain the custom of having four-letter symbols for Nasdaq companies.

“The question here is whether an exchange has exclusive intellectual property rights over a particular letter of the alphabet,” said James Angel, a finance professor at Georgetown University in Washington.

The dispute opens a new front in the rivalry between NYSE and Nasdaq over corporate listings, which accounted for at least 10% of their revenue last year. A trading symbol may be one of the factors a company considers when choosing which exchange on which to list shares.

NYSE and Nasdaq submitted dueling proposals to regulators last month that would create a system to reserve tickers for companies planning to go public and keep track of symbols that are already in use. Among the differences are provisions that would allow companies to transfer to another exchange without having to change their stock-trading symbol.

Last year, for example, Charles Schwab Corp. had to add a “w” to its ticker when it transferred to Nasdaq from the NYSE, where it traded under the symbol SCH.